


Like the Shoe Store (Found in American Malls)

by lonelywalker



Series: Was Pepé Le Pew Not Available? [1]
Category: Spy (2015)
Genre: Aldo is both the best and the worst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, First Time, Head Injury, Susan is just the best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:08:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21733495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: There’s an old joke about how to stop an Italian from talking...In which Aldo gets handcuffed to a bed, Susan gets answers, and no one remembers what happened inThe Departed.
Relationships: Aldo/Susan Cooper (Spy 2015)
Series: Was Pepé Le Pew Not Available? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576633
Comments: 21
Kudos: 52





	Like the Shoe Store (Found in American Malls)

There’s an old joke about how to stop an Italian from talking. Swiping her room card through the electronic reader and hearing that satisfying beep-clunk as the lock releases, Susan hopes the same tactic just might inspire one duplicitous Englishman to spill his guts. Or, at least, to keep her bosom, butt, and all other body parts grope-free till morning. She says a silent prayer to the espionage gods (a few non-silent prayers have already been offered up to Nancy, Goddess of the Basement) and opens the door.

She stands there for a moment, silent, dispassionate. It’s only once she hangs the Do Not Disturb sign outside, shuts the door, and locks it that she lets herself raise an eyebrow. “Seriously. How are you still alive?”

“What? You think I became international superspy for boredom and paperwork?”

Aldo - she has to think of him as Aldo when he’s using that accent - is lying flat on the bed looking for all the world like he might as well be sunning himself on some ridiculously pristine Capri beach… except for the steel handcuffs anchoring him to the thick wooden poles of the headboard. She’s impressed. Not really by his body, which is _fine_ but neither the gym-sculpted physique of the actual Fine or the rough-and-ready muscularity that Ford probably developed bench-pressing cattle. But by the fact the handcuffs seem to be real, functional steel, not the fuzzy variety she’s 100% sure he has among his possessions. And, because it’s Aldo, the fact he’s still wearing underwear. Even if they’re boxer-briefs that seem at least one size too small and have pineapples all over them.

Susan props her bag on the nightstand and takes off her coat. “You get a text telling you to strip and handcuff yourself to the bed and you just do it?”

He shrugs, which makes the handcuffs clank into the wood. “A text from you and I say to myself, Aldo, is worth playing the odds.”

“What if I was some terrorist or arms dealer or angry husband, coming in here with a gun?”

“Eh, I ‘ave, ‘ow you say, resources.”

Susan casts a look down his body, catching herself before she stares too long at his dick. “Yeah, well, you know how you say, Albert. That’s why we have to have a little chat.”

It’s been six months since Budapest. Six busy, busy months crammed with non-stop flights, unrelentingly unglamorous cover stories, and near-death experiences. During that six months she’d asked around about him, had Nancy delve through the files, even flirted with a visiting MI6 agent to try to tease out some info. But she’d hit brick walls no matter which angle she tried. Which was why, when she’d been sent to Venice and paired up with a familiar “ally,” she’d opted for the one angle she had left: straight-up asking the man himself.

“Tomorrow we’ve got to run down scientists making a dirty bomb, and I need to know you have my back. Trust’s all we have in this game, and you’ve been lying to me.”

Aldo purses his lips. The handcuffs clank again. “We all lie, no? This game is all about lies. You are Penny Morgan, cat lover from Iowa. But I not lie to you. One thing, maybe.”

“One thing. Sure, one thing. Who you are and everything about you. That’s at least two. Two fucking whoppers.”

“Susan-”

“What’s your name? Your real, actual, no-deception, no-bullshit name.”

He sighs. “My name, to myself, to my friends, is Aldo. You are my friend, I think, so…”

“So you were lying to me about Albert.”

“No, that… That was true also, but… It was very wrong of me to try to manipulate you like that.” He’s shifted gears into that crisp, utterly sincere English accent. “You deserve far better from me, from everyone, and I apologize.”

Susan narrows her eyes. “I feel like I’m being manipulated again, Notting Hill.”

Aldo grimaces and wrestles himself up into a sitting position. “Okay, I explain. But is long story.”

“Is short story if you keep dropping words like that. I already know you speak perfect English. Drop this fake accent.”

“Fake? Fine, you go away, learn Italiano, and we will be real.” For once, he seems genuinely upset by her barbs.

Susan throws up her hands and looks around for the minibar. He better not have emptied it already. “Have it your way, Aldo-bert. What’s your long story?”

He says nothing the entire time it takes her to put together enough teeny-tiny vodka samplers to make a reasonably adequate drink. When she goes back to the bed, taking off her shoes so she can sit up next to him, he’s not exactly pouting, but looks more troubled than he ever did when they were tied up in a dungeon. 

“My father is English,” he says. “He was a spy. A great one. They still talk about his missions today. In some ways he defined the modern art of spycraft.”

“Yeah, your dad was James Bond, got it. Skip ahead.”

“On one mission he met my mother in Rome. She was an opera singer, a great, great beauty. They fell in love, I believe truly, at least for a while. After his mission he married her, he quit the business, and I arrived. But when I was two, three, he left. I grew up in Rome, with no memory of my father, a man who didn’t really exist. Until he finally remembered that I did. I was ten and they sent me to boarding school in England, with this name that was on my birth certificate but wasn’t mine. So here is my lie - I did not learn English from _Downton Abbey_.”

“I figured. So boarding school must’ve been fun, right? Whole new country, new friends…” The teacher in her wants to believe it. The actual human being doesn’t for a second.

Aldo smiles. “Is great motivator for learning new language. Total immersion course. Don’t want to be drowned in swimming pool? Oh, hello chaps, I’m Albert, who’s for rugger?”

“Go on.”

“Rest of story is like all other stories. University. RAF. MI6. I become their man in Rome, budget cuts make me their man in most of Europe. But I only have to save the world a few times a year. The rest of the time I can be Aldo and have dinner with my mum and forget all their bullshit.”

“Huh.” The vodka isn’t bad. “So, what, you’re doing this whole accent and Italian alpha-male routine as some extended bit to piss off your dad?”

“Is also magnificent disguise. Niente, dear lady, the night is young, we are here in Venezia, city of love and romance…”

“City of rising floodwaters. I saw _Casino Royale_. So we’ll stay right here and avoid getting shot at or poisoned or made viral video sensations before morning.”

Aldo frowns at her, as though he’s genuinely having trouble parsing the sentence. “You are international woman of mystery and super spy Susan Cooper, and your plan is to… ‘ang out in the ‘otel room?”

“I’ve got to pick up all these h’s you keep dropping. Seriously, you want to go to some bistro, get made by the opposition, tossed into the canal, and then have to explain to _two_ agencies why we couldn’t keep our pretty little heads down for one night?”

He sighs and mutters something in Italian she doesn’t catch. “You will free me?”

“Hell no. I’ve got to sleep in this bed with you. It’s bad enough I didn’t bring leg irons and a chastity belt.”

“I promise you my penis will behave.”

“Yeah and that’s the problem right there. I don’t want to have to do some kind of penile threat assessment. So just hold your horses and tell me what you want from room service.”

The local teen who brings them their food half an hour later is clearly neither a terrorist nor very interested in Aldo’s captive state, keeping one eye on the soccer match blaring from his phone. This hotel might not be Murder Central, but the very fact Susan has to share a room and a bed with Aldo speaks to the Groupon-centric strategy behind the CIA’s travel plans. 

“Is MI6 better?” she asks, pondering the logistics of how Aldo’s going to eat his ravioli. 

“They think we are all ex-SAS and mostly at home sleeping in ditches, drinking our own piss.”

“Yeah, well, did they ever make you wear a cat sweater? Thought not.”

They reach a detente over the food that might be at least half motivated by the vodka: she’ll feed him (with a fork!) so long as he doesn’t make it weird. Weirder. And once she’s tugged up the comforter over his mostly-naked body and propped up pillows so they can sit halfway comfortably, it’s somehow not that weird at all. Like hanging out with a college roommate. Obviously not a best-friend kind of college roommate. The exchange student who mostly stays in his room and yet somehow has banged every girl on campus, and probably majors in something no one else is sure even exists.

“So you’re a legacy at MI6. What would you be doing if you’d stayed in Italy?”

Aldo chews thoughtfully. “A pianist.”

“Jesus Christ.” Then again, with a musical mother and fingers like those, he might not be choosing his answers based solely on pun value. And then _again_ again, she shouldn’t be thinking about his fingers, or any part of him. She went down that road with Fine, and where had that gotten her? “Where’s the remote?”

Italy, land of culture. Television of one soccer match and several dramatic-looking shows, all in Italian. Susan doesn’t know what she expected. Okay… the soccer is probably better than more ventures down memory lane, or awkward silence.

“Wait,” Aldo says as she thumbs through the channels. “I translate.”

They’ve settled on a black-and-white movie starring some people Susan thinks she should probably recognize - Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power were different people, right? (also, Tyrone Power is a _fantastic_ spy name). But everyone looked pretty much the same in washed-out 1938 cinematography.

After thirty seconds it becomes blindingly obvious she’s been underestimating Aldo. He translates more seamlessly than UN interpreters, that crisp “I went to Oxford and probably know way too much about rowing” accent playing perfectly with a hero who’s doubtless going to buckle a swash at any moment.

After five minutes, when she starts paying more attention to the screen than to eating her dinner and occasionally holding out a fork to feed Aldo, she realizes he’s not translating at all. “Yeah, I don’t know what you call a penis in Rome, but that’s definitely a sword.”

“Is metaphor. I translate and do semiotic analysis. Is modest talent.”

She has to admit he’s not exactly _wrong_. And what seems like a pretty by-the-numbers adventure film is livened up by Aldo imbuing the dialogue with frank discussions about erectile dysfunction, alongside the love interest’s continually thwarted plans to become a banana magnate and buy Wyoming. 

...and she wakes up the next morning, fully clothed, buried in blankets and pillows, grasping for what happened after that. 

It’s daylight, although some frantic blinking at the bedside clock assures her she isn’t actually late. But no matter how hard she stares at the pillows next to her, Aldo isn’t there. Neither are the handcuffs, which at least suggests he didn’t gnaw off his own hand overnight.

“God… Aldo!” Susan untangles herself and plants her feet on the floor. Whatever happened last night obviously wasn’t _that_ bad, but she remembers laughing, remembers trying to not think about how weirdly good Aldo smelled, and… the crick in her neck really suggests she might have fallen asleep on his shoulder.

Aldo appears from the bathroom, wet and glistening, and fortunately clad in a towel. “Buongiorno, beautiful lady. How you like we spend the night together, eh?” He looks disgustingly happy. And even more disgustingly awake. 

“How’d you get out of the handcuffs? Please tell me you didn’t dislocate any thumbs.”

“I ‘ave, ‘ow you say, resources.”

“Yeah, I know you know how to say ‘resources,’ _Albert_.” She really should’ve realized there was no way he’d handcuff himself without having an easy way to escape.

Aldo looks a little crestfallen. “I am saying this for, ‘ow you say, dramatic effect.” He beams again. “You should shower. I prepare our kit for the mission. After we save the world, we come back ‘ere, we talk about my resources.”

“God, does this _ever_ work for you?” She walks imperiously into the bathroom and slams the door. There’s no lock, but if Aldo comes in, she’s reasonably confident in her ability and intent to murder him with nothing more than complimentary toiletries.

Does it ever work for him. Fuck. She knows it does. He’s ridiculously tall and fit and drives a sports car. Between Aldo the lothario and Albert the gentleman, he must have slept with every model and actress and sexy spy between here and London. Maybe she would have been one of them, if he hadn’t been so compelled to break the charade in Budapest. Albert certainly fit her type - clean-cut, competent, charming, flawlessly polite. Basically Fine with a British accent. She would’ve gone to bed with him and counted herself lucky. 

Aldo, though, the _real_ Aldo… is crude and handsy and… She turns the water a little colder, scrubs a little harder. 

He had always seen beyond the dowdy cover stories, always taken for granted that she was just as able as he was, always looked at her as though...

_He’s in love with you._

The thought comes to her as clearly as if Nancy had said it, so much so that she’s prodding a soapy finger in her ear before she realizes. 

“Clearly,” she whispers harshly to the bathroom, “Aldo is not in love with me.”

The rebuttal comes fast and clean, like part of her brain has been locked away, composing a thesis on the subject for six months: you half believed Fine was in love with you, even wanted to marry you, and all he ever really did was hamstring your career and make you doubt yourself. Aldo just handcuffed himself to a bed all night for you.

“Well good for him, because there’s no way I-”

A rapping at the door. “Susan? I make espresso.”

Okay, he gets points for that one.

Their cover today falls midway on Susan’s own personal spectrum between cringeworthy and cool: party planners for the rich and famous who come to the Venice region to launch their products, marriages, and children. Aldo has a buttercup-yellow shirt, too much product in his hair, and a tie that looks like Jackson Pollock threw up on it. 

“Looking sharp… Alessandro.” 

Her wardrobe is far more sedate. He’s the flamboyant genius. She gets the measuring tape. All considered, it could be a lot worse.

“Satellite imaging shows the targets have exited the villa heading north, away from you,” Nancy reports on the drive over. “You should have plenty of time to get in, plant our bugs, and get out. Then once we know where the bomb is, we can send in the experts to neutralize it.”

“And if anyone sees us, we’re just two arty idiots who can’t program a GPS.”

Aldo flicks a glance at her after she’s shut off the comm. Driving under the speed limit seems to be causing him physical distress. “They’re leaving something out.”

“No, Nancy’s always straight up with me.”

“Then they’re leaving her out of the loop too. You think they really need two of us to plant some bugs?” 

Susan considers it. “Two’s better for the cover story.” But there’s something in that.

He frowns, shifts up a gear. “Be ready.”

What does feel unsettling is parking right out front and walking in through the main doors in broad daylight, Aldo talking non-stop about… Well, it’s mostly in Italian, but she can pick out some comments about the interplay of light and shadow, color palettes, and a whole bunch of bullshit he probably inhaled from some reality shows. 

The villa itself seems weirdly empty - not just of people, but of any kind of personal effects, any sign that someone lives here. Susan diligently gets out her tape and plants the bugs, all the while nodding at Aldo’s commentary like a dutiful assistant, but something… Something is _up_ and she wants to check in with Nancy, but can’t for fear of their own security devices.

“Katerina?”

That’s her name. Of course it is. “Si, maestro?” she mutters, snapping her tape back and going to find him amid an absolute maze of rooms. 

Aldo’s standing at some French windows leading out to a pine terrace. It really would be a beautiful location for a party. But that’s not what he’s looking at.

Behind the house, just sitting there on the lawn like some kid’s tricycle, is a… Well, it probably has some cool military codename like _Wraith_ or _Phantom_ , but it’s a frickin’ fighter jet is what it is.

“F-35 Lightning,” Aldo says. So, sure. That.

Susan is just lifting her hand to her ear, because what the _hell_ , why wasn’t this picked up by the satellite, when there’s the unmistakable sound of a door being unlocked. And not the front door, either. A large, reinforced door under the main stairwell that looks conspicuously out of place amid the otherwise stylish decor.

Aldo goes to throw himself into it, but it’s too much ground to cover. He does tackle the first guy emerging from what Susan has to assume is a good old-fashioned basement lair, but the second guy clocks him right in the back of the head with his gun and Aldo goes down on one knee. Susan takes aim and fires over his head. The second guy flops forward, and Aldo shoulder-barges the door closed. 

“Are you okay?” 

Aldo says nothing, just waits while she maneuvers a chair into position to keep the door shut. When he gets to his feet, he clutches at the back of his head, and his hand comes away bloody.

“Nancy? What the _hell_?”

“Look, that question is fully justified, but I-”

Susan cuts her off, flinging out an arm toward the actual frickin’ plane on the lawn. “Aldo, can you fly that thing?”

He grimaces, and honestly he looks a little unsteady on his feet. On the other hand he’s so tall that not pitching over must be a daily struggle. “Why do you ask?”

“Because that’s one big dirty bomb delivery device, one of us has to get it out of here, and I’m hoping your fighter jet training adds up to more than watching the _Top Gun_ volleyball scene on repeat.”

He glances back at the door. “I haven’t been in anything like that in ten, fifteen years. And vertical takeoff… never.”

“Great, well everything’s gotten way more simple in the last ten years, right? You can probably fly these things with an app. Punch the big red button marked UP.” She’d taken that speech right out of the dictionary, see under Wishful Thinking. If they’d been in any other situation she’d have demanded Aldo see a medic and get Nancy to send in a proper crew. But that door wasn’t going to hold much longer, and what she’d seen of Venice seemed too nice to be utterly obliterated.

“Susan.” Whatever Aldo’s accent was when he was too stressed and shaken to think straight, he did at least sound sincere. “You have to get out of here. Now.”

“No, I have to cover you. So get your Italian ass in that plane, flyboy.” She takes his gun - he won’t be needing it - and gives him a shove toward the fighter. He backs up for a couple of steps, as though he’s going to argue or more likely gush about how great her bosoms look in action, then turns and hurries across the lawn.

Susan takes cover behind an overturned marble table. “Nancy, how many goons are we dealing with?”

“No idea. That door seems to lead to a basement and our infra-red scanners aren’t picking up anything.”

“Like the satellite didn’t pick up a giant fighter jet? Tell me you’ve got someone there who can talk Aldo through this. Like, a YouTube tutorial at least.”

“He’s on the line with MI6. I think.”

“You _think_? What happened to inter-agency cooperation?”

A long sigh. “So Edgar told me you asked for his number and then never called, and then he changed all their response codes to _Spaced_ references, which I have been meaning to binge, but…”

“Hold please!” The door smashes open with a cloud of dust and a resounding clang that seems to vibrate the entire house. Susan picks off the first two guys through the door, glances around to see where Aldo is at, and rolls across the exposed hallway to take up a new position. 

Where Aldo is at, is powering up his plane, which makes more noise than should be legal in any backyard. No wonder there are no neighbors for miles. 

The third man goes down. The fourth, though… The fourth has some smarts and greater firepower, taking cover further down the passageway and spraying everything in sight with bullets. Susan hits the deck as stone shards and plaster fly all around her. “Nancy, how long before Aldo’s out of here?”

“I am trying not to blow up the plane…” Aldo is barely audible over the sound of the engines. “But you should get out of here. Now.”

“I’m trying not to _let_ them blow up the plane.” Susan scrambles behind a relatively unscathed section of wall, jams her gun in her waistband, and picks up a bronze vase that’s already scattered flowers across the floor. No sight line? No problem when your projectile is as big as this. 

She picks her moment and hurls that thing straight into the darkness of the doorway with power and accuracy that would delight Tom Brady. What delights her is the cry of surprise, and then the clattering of what sounds like multiple bodies going down a stairwell. Seeing Aldo finally get the plane off the ground, she heads in for cleanup.

“I hope you’ve told the Italians not to get all trigger happy on this random plane suddenly popping up on their radar.”

“Well apparently they never saw it the first time…” Nancy’s tone speaks volumes about the quality of inter-agency cooperation. “Is that all of them? You should get into that basement. See what’s going on in there.”

Susan creeps along the wall by the door and sneaks a glance in. As she thought, a staircase leading down, a whole lot of limbs and groaning men, and… Footsteps. No, not footsteps. Marching. “What’s going on, is whoever’s making dirty bombs is also assembling some kind of army. Where’s my backup?”

“Few minutes out.”

“Then I’m bailing. We’ve got the plane; these guys can’t do much damage. And if I go down there, I’m as good as dead. I knew we should’ve packed the flash grenades.”

On another day she might’ve taken the risk, darted down a few steps in the hope she could grab the automatic rifle and find enough ammo, then taken them out one by one in the narrow passage. But you have to pick your battles in this job, and she and Aldo had already done far more than they were sent out to do. So she sprints back to the car, where Aldo had left the keys in the ignition, and hits the gas moments before bullets blaze a trail right where her back tires had been.

By the time she makes it to the road outside, she can hear sirens.

“So where’s Aldo?” Got to have faith that the local SWAT guys could handle this scene. She had a partner-of-sorts who was flying one of the world’s most advanced planes with a cracked skull. 

“They routed him to a military airstrip. Not too far. I’ll guide you.”

Susan usually doesn’t care much for Aldo’s brand of _Bourne Identity_ driving, but she attacks these narrow, winding country roads like nothing would ever dare to come in the other direction. It’s still half an hour until she reaches the airstrip, and another ten minutes before she gets past two checkpoints, mostly through glaring and using all the curses from the “Learn Italian in 10 Minutes” book she’d read on the flight over (or maybe Nancy is on better terms with Interpol than with MI6).

She’d expected to see Aldo getting medical attention - or to not see him at all, if they’d whisked him away to the hospital immediately. But when she gets to the biohazard perimeter that’s been hastily thrown up, while guys in white suits examine the plane, there he still is in that gaudy buttercup yellow shirt, talking to a guy in uniform who’s wielding a clipboard and looking completely unprepared to handle this amount of activity on his airstrip.

“Eyyy!” Aldo sees her before she can work out whether to yell at him or kiss him. “Ciao bella! You’re all right, eh? They tell me _nothing_ on this radio.”

“So you landed the plane, huh?” This probably is not the time for small talk, but she’s trying too hard to resist the gallons of adrenaline that have replaced her blood. The CIA once slid a two-minute talk into some lecture at the Farm on why operatives tend to really, _really_ want to fuck after narrowly escaping death. They’d never actually mentioned what to do with that impulse. Follow it? Think about baby seals being clubbed? Shoot yourself in the head?

Aldo grins. His hair is even wilder than it had been this morning and his eyes are shining. “Piece of cake. You are my savior once again. We save Italia, you save me, I owe you a kiss.”

“That’s… that’s not…” Whatever argument about exchange rates she was about to voice is cut off by his lips on hers. Not, for once, some horrible leering attack or attempt to shove his tongue down her throat, just the briefest touch. 

And then, in the moment when she’s shocked she hasn’t shoved him away, and maybe he is too, Aldo says: “Is okay?” and she is _so_ glad they’re not alone in a hotel room right now, because she can think of very little that wouldn’t be okay.

“Mm hm,” Susan says, which is about as much as she can formulate with Nancy shrieking in her ear, slips an arm around his slim waist, and pulls him closer. 

Back in the day (a whole six months ago), she’d wondered whether she could just pay some blandly handsome guy to make out with her, just so she could close her eyes and pretend it was Fine actually realizing she was a human woman with needs and feelings. (“That’s a sex worker, Susan,” Nancy had helpfully pointed out. “You’re talking about hiring a sex worker.”) Aldo is… not Fine. And anything but bland.

“Sei bellissima,” he murmurs, and however much she seriously does not want to be giggling and blushing like a tween who actually buys his lothario act, she _does_ want this. His lips. His mouth. The way the world fades away at the edges when they kiss. She’d worried that doing this would mean that he’d won in some terrible, lecherous way. But he’s the one who seems overcome and breathless, stunned that she would ever actually want him.

Or maybe just stunned.

Her fingers slide into his glossy brown hair, which quickly becomes stiff and then really, really horribly wet. “No,” she says.

“No? I misjudged this?”

“No, I’m saying no because you can’t right now. Jesus, Aldo. Put your tongue in my mouth when your brains aren’t going to get all over my hands.” 

As she shouts for a medic - what the fuck have these ambulance guys been doing, taking a smoke break while Aldo’s got blood streaked all down his back - she remembers that adrenaline does a lot more than make people want to jump each other’s bones. It also numbs pain and keeps people on their feet way, way longer than they really should be. And, like the coyote in the cartoons, she’s just pointed out to Aldo that he’s been walking off a cliff.

“Susan…” he says, and she has to catch him before he faceplants on the tarmac.

Apparently a man who’s over a foot taller than her also weighs a _lot_. Who knew? “Hey, you’re okay,” she says, struggling to keep him upright and worrying more about keeping him conscious. “They’ll look after you.” 

The two paramedics do at least look a bit sheepish when they help her get him to their gurney and apply pressure to his head wound. To be fair, she should’ve probably been thinking more about that than certain other things too. 

“He got cracked on the head with a gun, hard,” she tells them. “And then he flew a plane, so god knows what altitude and g-forces did to his skull. Not that he had much of a brain to begin with.”

“We have to take him to the hospital,” one paramedic says, in a better American accent than anything Aldo’s ever said. “Who are you, the next of kin?”

Aldo says something, although it’s in Italian, or possibly delirious babble. 

“What?”

“I say you are future mother of my children.” His eyes are closed, but he’s smiling.

Susan’s busy rolling her eyes, who cares if he can see, when the paramedic nudges her. “He said you’re the greatest spy he’s ever known.”

She sighs. Classic bait-and-switch. “Fine, yes, give me the fucking paperwork.”

***

“So, long story short, it was a rat.”

Susan tosses her Starbucks cup in the trash, eyes the office coffeemaker with suspicion, and turns back to Nancy, who still hasn’t provided any of the elaboration she’d been hoping for. “Long story way too short. A rat? Like of the Mark Wahlberg variety?”

“I think you need to watch that film again. But no, an actual rat. A rodent. Tail and whiskers. Poor little thing chewed through wires in the ceiling and fried himself. At least I’m hoping it was a poor little thing, because I don’t want to imagine any more giant ravenous monsters skittering around up there.”

A glance at the wall clock by the coffeemaker confirms that they should really be going to the meeting Elaine had called. Susan takes Nancy by the elbow and steers her out into the corridor. “And a suicidal rat caused our Venetian clusterfuck how?”

“Shut off our link to the satellite. Which we’d normally know about because our screens would go dark… Except the tech guys helpfully built in a protocol where the system automatically calls up our most recent files from backup. Which is great for reports, a little sub-optimal for live satellite feeds.”

Figures. “So people looking at the real feeds assigned me and Aldo because they knew we were up against a bunch of guys and needed to fly that jet out of there. But then on the day we saw nothing. And apparently whoever assigned us had amnesia?”

Nancy’s ready for that one. “She was in Bora Bora actually. First holiday in years. Did you know holidays are a thing some people get?”

“What about where this plane came from? How it got there? Who the heck these people were, and why that mansion had a secret underground lair?”

Nancy stops dead. “Look I had answers to two questions. Two! You should be grateful and impressed.”

“I’m maybe one of those at most.”

They’ve had two weeks to come up with answers and, from the look of the reports Susan’s been cc’d on, those are still thin on the ground. Never mind that Susan and Aldo had provided them with several live suspects, dead bodies, a crime scene, and a whole fighter jet, there were still mysteries aplenty. One of them again being Aldo himself.

Susan had been pulled out of Italy immediately after debriefing at the airfield and she’d heard nothing from Aldo since. It was as if the man explicitly only existed when he was actually within six feet of her. Otherwise she might as well be talking about Jiminy Cricket for the amount of info anyone would give her. 

“If you’d just let Edgar take you out to dinner…” Nancy had said when Susan vented about MI6 stonewalling. 

“Nancy, I am not dating some random Englishman just to get MI6 to talk to us.”

Nancy had just stared off into the middle distance and made some remark about Susan being happy enough to swap spit with a non-random Englishman who was basically an international sex offender, so what about inter-agency cooperation and world peace, eh? Eh?!

Anyway, this meeting Elaine had called (marked EXTREMELY URGENT) with all senior staff sounded like it might actually bring a few more answers than those involving… DiCaprio? Damon? She really did need to watch that movie again.

“Ciao bella.”

It’s lunchtime, so obviously they are now in the busiest corridor in the entire world, but she’d have heard those two words anywhere. Heck, she’d been hearing them just about everywhere for two weeks through the power of wishful thinking: in bed, in the shower, maybe even some places she wasn’t undressed.

Aldo’s just… standing there, alive, upright, in his shockingly well-tailored Savile Row suit with purplish-blue pocket square. She wants to shout in his face about how “magnifico” he looks, but what she manages is: “How are you here?” in a very loud whisper.

“I crawl through air vents like Tom Cruise.” He smiles, pleased with himself. “What? My government sent me to ‘ave very boring meeting, but was that or play golf with my father, so I come ‘ere to see you, sexy spy lady. Ladies,” he amends, seeing Nancy.

Susan vaguely gestures between them, not taking her eyes off him for a second in case he evaporates. “Nancy, you know Aldo…”

“Albert,” Nancy says, frostily. “Lovely to see you again.”

“You didn’t call me,” Susan’s tone is sharper now. “I left you bleeding in an ambulance with literal paperwork with my literal number on it, and you didn’t call me. Also your MI6 handler is weirdly passive aggressive.”

Aldo nods. “Apologies. I was not very, ‘ow you say, conscious for a few days. They say you busy with other mission, I not worry you. But now I ‘ave dashing scar, I visit you across ocean, is very romantic, no?”

Susan tries to ignore both Nancy’s groan and the fact that Aldo’s English actually seems to be getting worse. “You have a dashing scar?”

“Where no one will ever see it, but perhaps that’s for the best.” He ducks his head down close to hers and takes her hand so he can trace her fingertips along where the back of his head is still ridged and swollen.

“Okay, I don’t really need your cerebellum all over my hands again…”

But he cuts her off with a kiss - one she returns, hand against his cheek, for just long enough that he knows she’s not truly mad or repulsed when she pushes him away. 

“We’ve got a meeting to go to,” she says, just as Nancy clears her throat louder than any human has ever needed to in history. Elaine is here. And Fine. Susan briefly considers banging Aldo on the conference room table just to make a point, but settles for pushing open the door and heading straight for more coffee.

The meeting goes on at least three times longer than it needs to, circling around to the same core issues: a lack of answers, inter-agency clusterfucks, and (courtesy of Rick Ford), whether Aldo’s ever had to swan dive off the Kariba Dam or repair a rocket ship in zero-gravity.

Susan gets nothing more from the meeting than Nancy had reported, except for the opportunity to watch Aldo in full Albert mode: professional, precise, and ever-more frustrated by the discussion. She senses there’s a good deal of confusion among the CIA staff members about precisely where Aldo falls on the totem pole - Italian airport shuttle driver, or the British government’s official representative, who can’t be fobbed off with vague excuses.

“You sounded impressive in there,” she tells him once they’re finally freed.

He frowns and flicks strands of hair back from his forehead. “I’m not in England enough anymore, it’s exhausting. I have to translate everything in my head.”

“And when you’re talking to me?”

A sly smile. “The words don’t matter. How could they, with those beautiful bosoms right in front of me?”

“I’d hit you, but I bet another concussion would just make you even worse.” She slips her hands in her pockets, feeling awkwardly adolescent. “So… you’re heading back to London?”

“My father would like me to, yes, so I am determined to stay here.” Aldo casts his gaze over the CIA’s now mostly darkened offices. “I have, as you know, a devastating head injury, plus it looks like this mess will take weeks to untangle. Really it’s best for everyone that I stick around.”

“Best for everyone, huh?”

Aldo looks back at her once more. “I was hoping,” he says, “that you’d do me the very great honor of allowing me to take you to dinner.”

Susan narrows her eyes. “No.”

His eyebrows raise. “No? I gauged this wrong? I thought we-”

“No, that wasn’t what you were hoping, Aldo. No bullshit, remember? Try again.”

She sees him consider it and look around to check that Nancy isn’t lurking behind a water cooler. “Well then… I was ‘oping that you’d do me the very great ‘onor of allowing me to pleasure you orally and then ejaculate inside you.”

“Yeah,” Susan says, “somehow I like that better.”

***

She doesn’t drive an Alfa Romeo. Or any car that wouldn’t be incredibly embarrassing in the high-stakes world of international espionage. Or even any car that doesn’t require Aldo to basically fold his shins in order to get in it. But it’s a basic, functional car that takes them to her basic, functional suburban house, and no one gets groped or murdered on the way. Mostly because Aldo’s six-foot-four body is wedged in so tightly it’s dangerous to move.

“Okay,” she says, pulling up outside and cutting the engine. “Ground rules.”

“Yes.”

“One, I don’t have cats. Never had cats. Actually kind of allergic. So no cat jokes.”

She can see him nodding in the darkness.

“Two, the way you behaved when we first met was weird and creepy and pretty much assault, and anything we do from now on is in no way an endorsement of that.”

“This is… assumed.”

“And three, if you ever run into any of my neighbors, I need you to pretend to be hot Italian and British twins. They’ve all been judging me for years. It’s payback time.”

She goes to open the door. Stops. “Aldo. Have you been married? Had serious relationships?”

“Why do you ask this?”

“Because no one ever seems to know or want to tell me a single fact about you, and I need some guarantee you’re not hitting on me like it’s a compulsion just to piss off your dad that you’re sleeping with an uncultured American.”

A pause. Aldo reaches up to flick on the interior light. That eerie, too-bright yellow light that makes her think the entire neighborhood just started watching them.

“You know how it is for us, I think. People die. People leave. People hold you at gunpoint at 4am and make you jump off the roof of the Vatican. It is like you said. All we have is trust. You are the first person I have wanted to trust in a long time. And yes, my dad would hate you. But my mum… My mum is very eager to meet this hot-as-fuck American superspy who saved all of Italy from terrorists.”

Susan smiles despite herself. “You told your mom about me?”

“Of course. I am good Italian boy, no? I go to church, drive like maniac, and tell my mother everything. Especially when I fall in love.”

That one calls for a very, very deep breath. “How often do you fall in love?”

“Maybe you should take me to your cat-free house now. And also we order food, eh? I only get peanuts and Pepsi on plane.”

She’s got all judgy-sensors on high alert when she lets him into the house that is very much not some swanky London or Rome bachelor pad, and also hadn’t been anticipating that anyone would see it before Christmas. But at least it doesn’t actively smell, and she can snatch up the four, no, five random sweatshirts lying around and throw them into the laundry room before he says a word. 

Aldo drops his overnight bag by the couch, taking off his jacket and unthreading his tie. The ever-present gold chain glitters at his neck.

“How’s your head? Seriously.”

“Seriously, it is fine. Just don’t poke stitches.”

“You understand why I’m asking, right?”

He nods. “Yes, I understand this consent.”

“Oh you understand it _now_.” She looks over the takeout menus that are wallpapering her fridge. “How do you feel about Thai? And you know what, I think there’s some shitty wine in that cabinet someone gave me for saving their ass last month.”

“I am connoisseur of shitty wine.”

He’s got it opened and poured into two tumblers by the time she’s finished ordering by phone. Of course Aldo is the kind of man who takes care to smuggle a Swiss Army knife, complete with corkscrew, past airport security. “So, what is the plan?” he asks once she plops down next to him on the couch and clinks glasses.

“While we wait for the delivery guy to show up with some cold food that’s definitely not what we ordered? I’m going to find _The Departed_ on Netflix and we’re going to pretend to watch it while making out.”

Aldo regards her analytically. “Making out… This will entail…”

“Yeah, you can touch my boobs, you big freak.”

It quickly becomes very, very clear that she isn’t going to figure out the plot of this movie any time soon, not with the combination of Aldo kissing her, his warm hand slipping inside her shirt, and her phone doing crazy with texts from Nancy demanding to know what she’s thinking, and if she realizes there are actually other men in the world than the three lunatics she keeps getting partnered with on missions.

Susan finally manages to switch her phone to silent just as Aldo ducks his head and licks-kisses-sucks her nipple, all that wet warmth triggering a sudden insistent need between her legs that turns a snarky rebuke into a moan one syllable in. She’s an inch away from palming his dick when the buzzer sounds.

“I get it,” Aldo says. Good, he better, because the delivery guy does not need to see her with boobs hanging out, or as flushed and hot as she feels.

“Money’s on the counter. And take your shirt off. You get to grope me in public, you also get to give my neighbors a show.”

Aldo says nothing, just drops his shirt on the floor, kicks off his shoes, and drops his pants too. This time there’s no way Susan’s pretending not to look at his dick. Especially not when he’s wearing burgundy boxer-briefs emblazoned with A.S. ROMA and some kind of soccer logo.

It's a few minutes before he’s back from the front door, with a bag of food that at least _smells_ warm. “What took you so long?”

“Paolo the delivery guy asked me about Champions League. I ‘ave opinions.”

“The Thai delivery guy’s name is Paolo?” She should be covering herself up and getting ready to eat, but all she really wants is his hands on her again. His hands and his mouth. “It’s great that you getting in touch with your Italian heritage means becoming a complete stereotype.”

“Ah, but I am also stereotype of rich English asshole, so it counts as depths.” He rips open the bag and starts to lay out cartons on the coffee table. Each one makes her more sure of what she has to do.

“Aldo, how long do you think it’ll take for us to eat this?”

He considers it. “‘alf an hour?”

“Yeah… I’m going to need you inside me way, way before that.”

The bag drops to the table with a thud. “Is solid strategy. You have bedroom?”

She has bedroom. Not a bedroom that’s really the one she’d choose for this encounter in some ideal world, where she should be ravished by her Romeo between silk sheets, but at least one where everything’s pretty clean and nothing overtly embarrassing is out in full view, like a vibrator or a plush college mascot.

She lets him kiss her again. Lets him unbutton her shirt all the way and unhook her bra, all the while shivering with need, plus the dread that at any moment the charade might fall away and it would hit him that she was just Susan Cooper, non-sexy non-superspy with an unfashionable body in an unfashionable home.

Aldo’s hand lingers on the fly of her pants. “I eat you out now?”

“Oh, fuck yes.”

If she was just a little bit more shameless, she’d send Nancy a picture. Heck, she’d Instagram it: this gorgeous, ridiculous man kneeling on her bedroom floor, kissing her bare thighs in a way that makes her clit tingle, tonguing her slit that’s already so, so slick with want for him as she opens her legs wider, pushing up toward that smart mouth. His breath is hot and fast on her folds and she imagines that thick dick of his straining against his underwear. 

“Oh god.” She’s grasping for his head, tangling her fingers in his hair before she remembers the wound, the stitches, but then he’s sucking, lapping at her clit, heat pooling in her belly, and, well, he’s just going to have to scream if she’s hurting him.

Her eyes flutter closed, her free hand rolling a nipple between two fingers as Aldo shifts, slides a finger inside her, where she already feels embarrassingly wet and open, begging to be fucked and filled. Maybe next time she’ll be chill - because yes, god, there better be a whole lot of next times if the awkward first time is this good - but right now his mouth on her, his fingers curling inside her are pure bliss, building and brightening until she’s pulsing and clenching around him, his name nothing more than a gasp on her lips. 

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…” It takes her what feels like a long, long time to come down from it, her body spent and boneless, the world seeming completely unreal around her until Aldo strokes his thumb down her cheek and kisses her deeply, the taste of her on his tongue.

“There’s… in the drawer, condoms.” If she keeps spending time with him, and he keeps doing that to her, she’s going to develop a real problem with grammar.

Aldo strips off his underwear and sits on the edge of the bed, rooting around in the drawer of the nightstand. There _are_ condoms, even though he has to tear off the plastic wrap because the last time she got laid in this house it was during the Bush administration. In the meantime, she curls a hand around his dick, big and hard and uncircumcised, and his breath catches as she strokes him, his hand clasping hers, showing her.

“When I met you, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” Aldo’s still fiddling with the condoms, almost shyly not meeting her eyes. “And that was in a wig and a cat sweater. Now I realize I was very wrong… You’re a goddess.”

She gives his dick a friendly squeeze. “You’re very sweet. And an idiot. Maybe also blind. I mean you’re aware Monica Bellucci exists, right?”

“You ‘ave great taste. I think you go on top, no?”

“Yeah, if you want me to crush you.” She should really have remembered that her sarcastic remarks too often turn out to be Aldo’s darkest fantasies, his dick twitching in her grasp. “Okay, we’ll try it your way.”

She feels weirdly exposed moving over him, especially with the way he watches her, those dark eyes looking as though they want to drink in every moment of her being. Then his hands smooth along her thighs, rest on her hips, and guide her down onto him, his body arching up to meet hers. His dick, pushing up into her wetness, is gloriously thick and stiff, exactly what she needs to get off. Aldo might be talking out of his ass about goddesses, but she can’t remember the last time she felt this good, this full, her body radiating with pleasure on every breath, rocking in an achingly slow rhythm.

“Tell me what you need,” she murmurs. If this has to end, she needs Aldo to feel half the pleasure he’s giving her. But he’s got no answers in any language, his eyes wide, so she leans down, sweeping back sweat-tipped hair from his face and kissing him, which seems to at least jolt him back to this plane of reality, his arms going around her to crush her breasts against his chest, his hips angling upward to fuck into her harder.

If she didn’t love him - and who was to say she didn’t? - she was at least beginning to think about how she could feel this way on a regular basis, wrapped up in his warm, ridiculous body that smelled of espresso and engine oil and was probably eighty percent limbs. Was this how agents got turned? They started plotting terrorist threats across Europe just to have a decent excuse to get boned?

She moans his name, which she refuses to associate with shoe stores ever again, grinding into him, seeking that delicious friction between his body and her clit. His breaths are hers now: rapid, shallow, and nowhere near enough, but she can’t stop, caught up in the rhythm and the pursuit of something unbearably good. Then Aldo snakes a hand down between them, fingering her clit, and she’s gone, just gone, pulsing and clenching around him as the pleasure soars through her like some spirit given form. He pumps into her once, twice, and she sees it in his eyes when he gets there with her.

She collapses onto the bed next to him, struggling to get cool, cool oxygen in her lungs, and wondering if she’ll ever be able to move again. People in their forties weren’t supposed to suddenly start having amazing, incredible, mindblowing sex, right? On the other hand, she’d spent literal decades missing out, so if that meant spending more time getting intimate with foam rollers, so be it.

“That was-” Aldo starts after a long, long pause, and she elbows him in the ribs.

“Don’t ruin this for me.” She’s had more than a few awkward post-coital conversations, but never with a man more likely to start waxing lyrical about terms she’d prefer stayed in a biology textbook.

“-incredible?” He rolls over onto his side, having already discarded the condom. “You are truly magnificent. And now I will get food, yes? Never fear, I will switch light on so neighbors can see me microwaving naked.”

Susan doesn’t have a better response to that than to snuggle up under the covers, body still vibrating from the afterglow, and check her phone to see that the world hasn’t ended. Well, there are 32 messages from Nancy (and a few rude emojis from Rick) but nothing indicating that anyone is in any kind of peril not directly related to Aldo’s penis. 

He’s back in five minutes with the wine and reheated cartons: “There is news?”

Susan tucks her phone under a pillow. “The CIA seems to be on high alert about an Italian eggplant.”

“Ah, parmigiana di melanzane. I make for you. Maybe not naked, but I make.”

The last time they ate like this, they were in Venice and he was handcuffed to the bed. Despite the lack of exotic surroundings, she much prefers this: the easy domesticity of takeout food wedged between them, the way he looks at her with unfiltered adoration, and the promise of a tomorrow that might be death-defying peril, might be lacing her fingers in his and showing him around the National Mall.

“There’s no _Departed_ in here,” she says. After her many long days at the office, falling into bed exhausted and sometimes fully clothed, there never seemed to be any point in installing a TV.

Aldo shrugs and feeds her a shrimp from his pad Thai with chopsticks. “I see it many times. I recap for you.”

“Is this the Scorsese version or the Aldo version?”

“Is best version, so of course the Aldo version.”

Susan takes a sip from her glass of wine and lets her head rest on his shoulder. “Aldo… what’s your last name?”

He laughs. “Again, is long story.”

She smiles and closes her eyes. “We’ve got time.”


End file.
